Donkey Rides and Mental Health

The past few weeks have been good. I have been moderately productive with my work efforts, and have managed to get out of site a decent amount. I have to begin 2 weekends back, when a nearby PC companion and I headed down south to visit the site of another friend for what I was told was a "party". After the 5 hour commute via souk bus, and picking up another volunteer along the way, we finally pulled into the small town, which was still 2 and 1/2 kilometers from our final destination. For those of you who are not familiar with the souk bus, it is a lot like the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride at Disney World, but stops being fun much sooner, and lasts A LOT longer. It is also my primary mode of transportation in the south, as there is no train near me, and it is cheaper than a taxi.

Once we started to make our way there via foot, as we were passing by a donkey cart, one of my counterparts had a genius idea. Without saying more than "I've got a great idea!", he ran over to the man driving the donkey cart, began talking to him in his local Berber dialect, and proceeded to ask him if we could catch a ride in his cart to our "work meeting". Judging by the mans reaction, this was the first time 3 white guys had approached him speaking Arabic and Berber asking for such a thing. Fortunately, he was able to squeeze us into his busy donkey man schedule and take us there. We made ourselves comfortable in the rickety wooden and metal cart and continued to chat with the man, jokingly asking him to take us all the way to Tata, a town about 8 hours away by souk bus, and that we would pay for his food. About 30 minutes and a 100 confused looks from locals later, we pulled into our destination, which was in front of a Berber carpet co-op...one of the 5 small mud houses that comprised the village, where we met up with 2 additional volunteers, thus completing the party attendees. Despite the small size of the gathering for which we spent half a day of traveling, it turned out to be a fun evening, and im sure gave the locals plenty to talk about.

The following weekend I attended VSN(Volunteer Support Network) training. The VSN is a network comprised of volunteers, that exists to help counsel other volunteers who are in need of it. The Peace Corps can be incredibly stressful and frustrating at times, and there are endless amounts of problems that can arise during ones service. So many that VSN was created to help relieve the PC medical counseling staff of some work...plus sometimes it helps just to speak with another American volunteer that you can relate to. The training lasted for 4 days, and was surprisingly therapeutic. We spent the majority of the training practicing counseling through role plays, in which we traded off being the counselor and the counselee. After an initial run through, I found that it was much easier to play the role of the person being counseled if I used some of my own problems, as opposed to made up ones. It felt good to talk to someone about things such as difficulty adjusting to my new hobbit-like lifestyle and being myself in a different language and culture. It was also good to see some friends from PST that I hadn’t seen in a while, and eat tasty food that was provided from our pcv host, who like many volunteers is an amazing cook. I left feeling refreshed, Zen like, and ready to pass on the feeling to anyone in need. The following day I went to the dentist in Ouarzazate to replace a filling that had fallen out a few weeks prior. I was relieved to find out that the PC dentist is good, and that I was able to describe that I had lost a filling in Arabic.

So this is everything that I can think of that is worth mentioning for this week. There are several things coming up that I will wait on to provide commentary. Until next time.